After Young Thug’s “Wyclef Jean” video was released on Monday, co-director Ryan Staake was everywhere. “There’s so many videos that are really similar to each other, especially in hip-hop,” Staake told The FADER. In another interview, he referred to the clip as a “marketing gem.” The video, which has been largely positive received, has racked up nearly 3.5 million views in two days, and received praise for its novelty. It presents a tardy Young Thug as an antagonist, Staake’s barrier to realizing a vision.

As the clip tells it, the “Wyclef Jean” video was originally meant to be co-directed by Staake and Thug. In an audio file played at the beginning of the video, Thug envisions the same kind of fun and cartoonish treatment he brought to the “Best Friend” video. Staake’s original concept was to literally burn the video’s $100,000 budget, which Thug’s label nixed. This idea came across to me just as gross 22 years ago, when anachro-pop collective The K Foundation set £1 million on fire for reasons they’ve never been able to explain and later came to regret. Staake, apparently eager to challenge notions of what music videos can be in arguably played-out ways, incorporated the audio file of Thug explaining his concept into the finished video, as though he hoped a device from the Postmodernism 101 playbook could compete with Thug’s originality. “I think seeing something jarring and bizarre is refreshing to people,” Staake told The FADER.

But few things are as refreshing, jarring, or bizarre as Thug’s art and personality. Even if how it peels back the process of video making is exhilarating to some, Staake’s finished product is also imbued with a cynicism that strikes me as totally wrong for an artist like Young Thug, who defies hip-hop’s traditional masculinity and questions the existence of gender. These statements reveal an intense and uncompromising engagement with his chosen art form, one that is likely impossible without a profound optimism about what it can say and who it can reach.